SHELBY STEELE

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University who specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He is a New York Times best-selling author whose books include White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America and The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. Steele has written widely on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs on race relations.

Steele’s works and contributions have garnered many awards. In 2006, Steele received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 1991, his work on the documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst was recognized with an Emmy Award and two awards for television documentary writing—the Writer’s Guild Award and the San Francisco Film Festival Award. The Content of Our Character was the recipient of the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award. 

Steele’s most recent book, White Guilt airs a radical viewpoint, outlining how a half-century of misguided efforts to reverse the transgressions of racism have not only failed, but have created a widening gap between the races and stripped our society of the moral authority it once enjoyed. National Book Award winner and author of Middle Passage, Charles Johnson declared, “With his characteristic honesty, clarity and hard-won wisdom, Shelby Steele exposes the social hypocrisies and racial lies that transformed the once promising post-civil rights era into a period of cultural decadence and mediocrity.”

Steele has written extensively for major publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Newsweek, and the Washington Post. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine. He has also spoken before hundreds of groups and appeared on national current affairs news programs including Nightline and 60 Minutes.

Steele is a member of the National Association of Scholars, the national board of the American Academy for Liberal Education, the University Accreditation Association, and the national board at the Center for the New American Community at the Manhattan Institute.

Steele holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University, and a B.A. in political science from Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He lives in northern California.